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On Tuesday, after hours of debate, Toronto city council finally passed a loosening of regulations on the now-trendy cuisine conveyances that we’re told will allow a proliferation of streetside eats throughout the city, for really, really, real this time. Maybe. Possibly.

Let Mayor John Tory and city council declare victory. The rest of us can wait to believe it when we taste it.

Even recognizing this as “progress” — a concept emphasized by Tory and food-truck boosting councillors like Josh Colle and Josh Matlow — we can also acknowledge it’s a partial victory at best. This set of revised regulations only looks like liberation for the meals-on-wheels crowd compared to the multi-padlocked straitjacket encased in an iron maiden wrapped in chains that has governed them since the last food-truck victory cry of “free at last” rang out in council chambers just over a year ago.

And while many of us can admit we’re fed up with the endless debate and discussion on this relatively insignificant issue — the option to pick up a sandwich probably wouldn’t rank with alleviating poverty or making housing affordable on anyone’s priority list — we might also stand in horror at what the city’s hesitant, conservative approach exemplifies about our government:

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A strong bias in favour of the status quo;

A shameless insistence on protecting the competitive advantages of existing business owners;

A seemingly endless impulse to pre-emptively micro-regulate any imaginable aspect of an issue rather than to design regulation in response to actual apparent problems.

One thing not on that list of things to which city council demonstrates a bias is the interests and desires of the vast bulk of citizens who, as far as I know, are not crying out for regulations to save them from an abundance of choices.

City council has been discussing and debating and hesitating and hedging its bets on this file for years now — more than a decade, if you broaden the focus to street food permits in general.

The David Miller-era attempt to deliver greater sidewalk food cart options was a fiasco of absurd over-regulation that essentially bankrupted the very few hand-picked new cart operators it licensed. The Ford-era food truck reforms passed last year that were said to be an emancipation proclamation for the industry set absurdly high $5,000 permit fees and basically declared all of downtown Toronto — the one part of the city where foot traffic is high enough to make mobile food vending an attractive business — off-limits to food trucks.

As a result, we heard during Tuesday’s debate, that bylaw resulted in just 17 operators applying for mobile vending permits. In a city with a metropolitan population of 6 million, we have 17 trucks.

So now council is taking another kick at the can, saying that instead of needing to stay 50 metres away from existing restaurants, they can now venture as near as 30 metres — a little more than the distance from centre ice to the goal line at the ACC — though food truck operators had asked for it to be five metres.

Councillor Mary Margaret McMahon called it liberation, Mayor John Tory called it progress, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti declared it the end of mom-and-pop restaurants in the city. The rest of us can wait and see.

But it’s still bass-ackwards. The new, revised law retains the same permit fees. The new law remains one that has as its primary purpose the protection of existing bricks-and-mortar restaurants — as if sheltering those businesses from competition by shutting out other business owners is a legitimate municipal goal.

And it still takes the approach of assuming everything is prohibited and then carefully circumscribing what will be exempt from those prohibitions. A better approach might be to allow everything, and then prohibit that which is demonstrated to cause problems.

A good law might charge a reasonable fee — a few hundred dollars a year? — and require trucks to pass a health inspection. Then it would allow them to park in any place where parking is allowed and sell what they want to sell. If problems arise, a review of the law could tweak it later.

But that is not the way our city council does things. As the food truck law was under discussion, the chamber was full of taxi drivers and plate owners there to demonstrate on either side of an overhaul of cab regulations that was debated and worked on for years, and passed last year. The licensing committee had now proposed scrapping the changes to protect the interests of existing taxi company owners.

Later in the meeting, development charges for the Scarborough subway, approved with tax increases in 2013, were expected to generate some controversy now that developers (and therefore councillors) realize what they mean. And the Sheppard LRT — approved and under construction in 2009, cancelled in favour of a subway plan in 2010, then re-approved in 2012 — was back on the agenda, in the form of a proposal to re-cancel it in favour of that same old subway plan.

During debate on food trucks, Mammoliti vowed the mobile vending issue would come back later so these reforms could be undone.

“I’ve learned in my short time here,” Mayor Tory responded, “that just about everything comes back.”

They all come back, again and again. And if there’s a way to deal with them halfway, or less than halfway, so that no real changes will be experienced for years, or at all, and even those changes can be reversed again on a passing whim — if there’s a way to approach a job that needs doing in a way that ensures it remains mostly undone and preserves the status quo, our council will find a way to do it. And declare victory each time.

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